Shinobi Do Not Like Colors
by Tirfarthuan
Summary: Civilians never understood. And, in some ways, it was best for them not to try.


I wrote this because I needed to write something, and I think that I found something along the way. This is the product of musings and questions both unasked and unanswered, and it shows that you don't always find something pleasant when you look underneath the underneath. You can't always explain things, either, and so I haven't, at least not fully, and perhaps that is the point. But there is something here all the same, if you want to look for it.

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><p>Shinobi do not like colors.<p>

Civilians never understood this. It was just one of the many differences between the battle-hardened ninjas and the untrained citizens. Sometimes attempts would be made to bridge the gap of understanding, but to someone who lives a life untouched by clashing blades it seems paradoxical. The difference between the protectors and the protected is an insurmountable obstacle to comprehension.

It was a concept that none of the uninitiated could grasp fully and none of the aware could explain properly. It was a primal feeling, an instinct that was present in every ninja in every nation since the first ninja held a kunai. Both the warriors and the civilians would try to talk to each other about it at times, when blood flowed like water and a fighter's sorrows were drowned in liquor, or when civilians questioned the ninjas' illogical methods and beliefs. There were other issues, of course. 'What is this Will of Fire you keep mentioning?' 'Why doesn't the Kazekage just deal with Gaara himself?' 'If Pein-sama controls the weather, why does he always make it rain?' 'Why don't you just make more swords so that you can reform the Seven Swordsmen?' 'Why does Raikage-sama need a tag-team partner?' 'If you're worried that the Jinchuuriki might lose it and lash out, shouldn't you try to be nicer instead of making yourselves the enemies?' Civilians didn't understand a lot of things that ninjas did. Sometimes the civilians saw more clearly than their bloodstained guardians, sometimes they didn't have all the facts, and sometimes they just couldn't understand.

How could ninjas not like colors? What about Gai, with his green? What of Naruto and his orange? Jiraiya of the Sannin wore colorful robes! Even the ANBU, the soldiers most dedicated to the codes of conduct, had decorated masks with colorful, though not gaudy, markings.

And come to think of it, some civilians said on the rare occasions when the topic was broached, weren't white, black, grey, and silver colors as well? Even muted colors and plain colors were still colors. And think of all the flashy jutsus that ninjas used, with flames and glowing chakra and flashes of light. How could a ninja say so absolutely that they hated colors?

To a civilian, it was paradoxical. To a ninja, it was a fact of life.

The thing that civilians simply could not understand could be distilled to this: colors meant death.

It didn't matter what clothes you were wearing, what mystical technique you wielded, or what glow illuminated the night, colors meant death for ninja. Death of principles. Death of allies. Death of hope. Your death. Your friends' deaths. Your foes' deaths. Colors equaled death.

There was a reason that none of the teachers or senior officers spoke up when Naruto wore orange or Lee wore green or Sakura wore red. It wasn't because they had some secret desire for their young charges to die. It simply didn't matter. Black was as likely to get you killed as purple. A silver blade could cut your throat just as well as a green one. Red was as likely to be your blood as your enemy's. The truth was, ninjas did not wear their favorite colors. They wore the colors that they disliked the least, the ones that had the most good memories and the least bad ones. Colors meant death.

Some therapists tried to analyze it, to come up with logical, reasoned explanations for this universal dislike of colors, but such attempts were fruitless. Those who tried could not grasp the reasoning behind it, could not understand how ninjas seemed to think that anything that was any color was so strongly associated with death. Those who understood did not try. To them, it was as obvious as breathing that colors meant death, and they could not understand why their fellows seemed to think this meant that ninjas associated everything around them with death.

Some scholars would postulate that the origin of this feeling was the bijuu, whose varied appearances had introduced the various regions of the elemental nations to destruction incarnate in almost a full spectrum of colors. Others pointed to various famous human sources. Many old ninjas from Iwa had a paralyzing fear of flashes of yellow light. Black lightning was many times more potent than the regular form, as Darui and his predecessors had proven. Anyone who had seen Hoshigaki Kisame on the battlefield was used to associating blue and spurts of red with death. Metallic weapons glinted as they buried themselves in flesh. But the scholars that worked in intelligence would scoff at such things. Sources of the idea? Hah! Everyone knew it to be true. Everyone had always known it. It predated history!

The basic issue was this: colors meant death. This was a far-reaching concept that meant many things, but at its most basic it meant that if you saw a color, you had to be ready to fight or die. It was like the old saying 'I saw red', except that where a civilian might be speaking of their anger, a ninja would instead be talking about blood in their eyes or a fireball about to engulf them. Black meant that you had been functionally blinded, and you had to hope that it wasn't permanent. White could be anything from a flash bomb to a hospital ceiling, and anything between the two wasn't pleasant.

Simple enough to understand when put that way. But there was much more to it than that. Moving objects were blurs of color, and anything that blurred tended to be bad. Colors indicated allegiances. Colors showed convictions. Colors gleamed from dew-covered flowers on memorials.

Of course, colors were also used in celebrations. Celebrations of births, of heroes, of peace. But despite such positive, life-oriented aspects to colors, the ninjas did not appreciate them in the slightest. No matter how beautiful a rainbow might be, a battle-hardened ninja could never devote his whole attention to it. A rainbow meant mist or fog, perhaps a waterfall or a recent rain shower. A ninja thought of watching his step, of making sure his senses were tuned to not be distracted from his purpose, of putting that little extra bit of chakra into concealing his movements so that he left no footprints in water-softened dirt. Civilians could relish the moment, but ninjas never could.

To a ninja, a baby meant a new target for enemies, someone that you had to protect. To a ninja, a festival meant an influx of people, a need to be on guard. To a ninja, colors meant something was abnormal, something was wrong. Ninjas had nothing against purple or blue or kill-me-orange, but 'colors' were different from colors in the same way that internal damage was 'bleeding' to a ninja while for a civilian 'bleeding' meant a cut finger.

In a way, it wasn't about colors at all. It was about duty. It was about the creeping fears in the dead of night that made retired shinobi join the guards on the walls. It was about the Will of Fire, though most nations had no name for it. It was the essence of the difference between the guardians and the guarded, the killers and the hirers, the soldiers and the civilians. The issue with colors was just a way to talk about it without having to say what everyone knew, that the ninjas were different from the non-ninjas. It was a way to talk about it without speaking of clashing blades and corpses and shattered innocence.

Once a friend or a family member becomes a ninja, they change. They are somehow less the person you once knew, and more a stranger who cares about you in some way. They aren't quite a part of the family anymore; they have a new family in their team. Their jounin-sensei becomes their new parent; their teammates become brothers and sisters, or perhaps more than that with time. A child getting their hitae-ate is to be celebrated in a ninja family, it means that the new genin will soon understand, that they will be able to comprehend their relatives in a way that they never could before. Their first kill is something that they will be helped through, their first C-rank missions are worthy of celebration, and their attempts to advance in rank are given the full support of their loved ones. But in a civilian family, each of these milestones is one more turn of the screw in the parents' hearts, one more difference between them and their child. Every day that the child wears the symbol of their village the child is a little less a child, a little more a trained killer, a little more… different… than what they might have been had they chosen any other profession. Every day, the child they knew died just a little more.

Team 7 had to face this more than most teams. To start with, they were a team composed of a boy from an extinct ninja family with severe mental trauma and anger issues, a boy who, officially at least, seemed to have simply come into existence fully formed on the day of the Kyuubi attack and had never had a family or been accepted as a valuable member of society by the village, and a girl from a civilian family with an inferiority complex and an id that acted as a second personality. Their teacher was a sociopath who had been a ninja since he was six years old, whose father had committed ritual suicide, whose team had been ripped apart by his actions on his first mission as a jounin, and whose jounin-sensei had died defeating a bijuu by sacrificing his soul to the death god. They lasted as long as they did by sheer 'luck', a curious blend of loathing and apathy, and a unanimous refusal to face their issues.

Team 7 should never have been formed. Placing four unstable, abrasive personalities together was a shot in the dark that even the Hokage had been doubtful about, but separating them would only have destroyed effective squads that he was able to create by placing the 'problem students' together and putting everyone else into workable formations. It was a recipe for disaster, and everyone just hoped for the best. But when Sasuke snapped, it was surprising. Everyone had expected Sakura to go first.

Ninjas with civilian families had to be placed together in order to keep themselves grounded, that was the accepted fact. The difficulties of becoming estranged from friends and family as you became embedded deeper within the ranks of the ninjas provided bonding with your teammates and your jounin-sensei helped you work through it. Placing a civilian-raised genin on a team of ninja-raised genin was counterproductive; it destroyed the support structure that should have helped genin like Sakura.

Sakura's success was a result of her extreme focus, which allowed her to become an excellent medic after her former focus, Sasuke, was out of reach. Her mental instability was perhaps the greatest of any of the members of Team 7, as it led her to completely cut herself off from civilian life, estranging herself from friends and family in favor of the ninja society. It was fortunate for her that Naruto, Sasuke, and Kakashi were all used to living alone without family, or they might have asked her about hers. But they never asked why they never saw her parents, and so Sakura never thought about it, and by the time she did the separation was so great that she could not even bring herself to want to reconnect. She was simply another broken person in a world of broken people, who was just a little bit better at acting like she was unshattered than most.

So it was never really about colors. The dislike was real enough, the lack of comprehension vast enough, but when a civilian asked a shinobi how they could say that colors were nothing but trouble when a high level jounin like Maito Guy was advocating green spandex, they weren't complaining about ninjas not making sense.

They were speaking of regrets and differences, and of the pain of a parent losing a child to a world that was as foreign to them as the other side of a rainbow.


End file.
